Blog Stats

Meta

At the moment I’m giving an online course on blogging and have been so busy reading and commenting n other blogs that I haven’t found time to write on my own blog.

Yesterday as part of the course we held a WiziQ session and invited a guest to talk about her blogging experiences. Karenne, the author of kalingoenglish, gave us inspiring ideas and useful tips on how to blog.

She described the many blogs she has kept, which has led me to write about my own blogs.

My blogging babysteps were for my first on-line course and several of us used a blogger blot together to share our experiences and help each other out. Once the course was over, the blog was no longer needed, but this experience was an important one for me, giving me courage to continue discovering the possibilities.

During the same course I opened my own reflective blog for the course. I wanted to explore the possibilities of promoting the Multiple Intelligences through the use of internet and on-line tools. It was called MIs of online learning – a long address!
It formed the basis of my final paper for the course. It was left alone for a while and then became used for my private class of kids for a short while. If you are interested in reading about the MIs, then you will need to into the archives.
It has been left, at least for the moment, as a document of work I have done. However, the idea of working with kids led to another blog with a second group of kids I was teaching privately, and a successful collaboration with a teacher in New York and a document of their work as well.

In the meanwhile I had opened two other blogs. In my first webheads session I opened this blog, which has turned into a kind of portfolio for me. And I opened my first class blog for my CAE students.
While this blog has remained with my, my first class blog was anything but successful. It was more of a suggestion than anything else. In the end I deleted it – goodbye blog.
The second one was better. I required my students to take turns summarizing the lesson, and got them on the blog, but not really blogging.

I realized that I had to let the students know from the beginning that the blog was an important part of the course, even if it wasn’t obligatory.
The next step was getting them to contribute. Real tasks helped, as well as surprise guests. Once I got the hang of it, I didn’t want to make a new blog each time. Now I’ve used the same blogfor two years and it offers links and is a place for the learners to say hi when they are off doing a language stay. Even jokes have been posted!
I have also realized that as soon as I let up on the blog, little will come from the learners. I’ve come to accept that and see that the blog can have quiet stages as well as active ones.
It can be time-consuming to keep up the blogs and I wish I had more time to keep all of them up, but blogging is still an adventure that I enjoy immensely.